A critical understanding of good governance and leadership concepts written in the context of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and the challenges to contextual discourse on Africa's development paradigms1

1. The article is partly developed from Maserumule's on-going doctoral study on the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) in terms of its treatment of the concept good governance and a paper he presented at the 2006 Social Sciences Conference, a collaborative research conference convened by the Africa Institute of South Africa (AISA), the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) and the Social Network of South Africa (SSNSA). Professor Gutto subsequently collaborated with Maserumule to substantially expand and deepen the original version by, among others, connecting good governance to leadership and situating African scholarship within the dynamics of changes (historical context) that have characterised Africa's politics and socioeconomic realities since the 1960s.

ABSTRACT

Good governance is a value-laden concept that is characteristically nebulous; it can mean different things to different people, depending on the context in which it is used. The same applies to leadership. Concepts, as Pauw (1999a, 465) puts it, are ‘tools of thinking’ and contexts are ‘the environments or frameworks in which they [concepts] operate’. Lucidity in the meanings of concepts is fundamentally important for shaping debate and enriching discourses. To maintain their power, concepts must be used in their proper contexts. This necessitates an understanding of the art of contextual discourse. Good governance is used in NEPAD as a principle and emphasised as a sine qua non for sustainable development in Africa. On the other hand, NEPAD premises Africa's re-birth or Renaissance on good governance and leadership, with a vision and commitment to repositioning the continent in global power balances. In this article good governance and leadership are considered as concepts. NEPAD is a textual context within which the two key concepts are used and should, consequently, be engaged. The article attempts a critical review of African scholarship engagement with good governance and leadership within the NEPAD context to determine the extent to which contextual discourse is practised. It further grapples with the immediate historical background to scholarship on Africa's development between the 1960s and early 1990s. The exercise reveals that much of the accumulated body of African scholarship and scholarship on Africa's development reviewed does not suffciently contextualise discourse on good governance and leadership within NEPAD, and its key assessment and monitoring device, the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), and offers an alternative framework.

Keywords:

• African Renaissance
• African scholarship
• APRM
• contextual discourse
• good governance
• leadership
• lekgotla
• NEPAD
• scholarship on Africa's development
• sustainable human-centred development paradigm
• Mo Ibrahim Foundation
• traditional leadership
• ubuntu

Notes

1. The article is partly developed from Maserumule's on-going doctoral study on the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) in terms of its treatment of the concept good governance and a paper he presented at the 2006 Social Sciences Conference, a collaborative research conference convened by the Africa Institute of South Africa (AISA), the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) and the Social Network of South Africa (SSNSA). Professor Gutto subsequently collaborated with Maserumule to substantially expand and deepen the original version by, among others, connecting good governance to leadership and situating African scholarship within the dynamics of changes (historical context) that have characterised Africa's politics and socioeconomic realities since the 1960s.